The Frozen Dead

By: Bernard Minier

Narrated by: Elijah Alexander

The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylums' director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing. Commandant Martin Servaz can't believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum is found on the corpse...and a few days later the first human murder takes place.

©2011 XO Editions (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Critic reviews

Chilling. - Elle

"This densely written and very atmospheric thriller is Minier's first novel. It has been a bestseller in France and, in this well-translated English edition, deserves to be one here." - Literary Review

"Bernard Minier's The Frozen Dead is a terrific thriller that will keep you up long past your bedtime. The French Pyrenees make a wonderfully atmospheric setting for this complex story of past crimes, madness and revenge. Servaz and Ziegler are a fascinating cop duo, and I hope to see more of them in the future. Excellent." - Peter Robinson, author of Children of the Revolution and Watching the Dark

"A publishing sensation in France, where it's rushed up the bestseller lists, this is Minier's first crime novel and this translation justifies its vast French reputation... With a villain possessing the intelligence of Thomas Harris's immortal Hannibal Lecter, this is great story-telling, with a creeping sense of dread that would not disgrace Stephen King at his best." - Daily Mail (UK)

"Revenge is at the heart of this clever mystery, which involves a plot as cold-blooded as the slaying of the horse" - Sunday Times (UK)

"An enjoyable and fast-paced thriller." - Sunday Business Post (UK)

"The writing is razor sharp and nothing goes to waste. Enough to make other authors jealous." - Femme Actuelle (France)

"Remember the name Bernard Minier... he might well take his place among the masters of French thriller writers." - Le Figaro (France)

"The Frozen Dead is a boiling-hot success." - Le Point (France)

Truly a work of a genius

It’s a real page turner you can barely bring yourself to put it down. Excellence!

Terrible narration. Just awful

Would you try another book from Bernard Minier and/or Elijah Alexander?

I might try a book by the author. I might even try this book again - but not with this reader. The French accents were so grating and distracting. Gah. So bad I couldn't even focus on the story, which, for all I know, might turn out to be OK.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrator voiced all the characters in awful French or Swiss accents. Really horrible accents. Like the accents from an Inspector Clouseau movie. Blech.

Read only if you love cliches

Narrator affects an annoying French accent that sounds like Inspector Clouseau. He frequently slips into a German accent without realizing it. I liked Minier's first novel, but this one is a bomb. The story is cliché-ridden and internally inconsistent. Just one example: Whenever a character confronts a crisis or something unexpected, some part of that person's body either convulses, burns, freezes, or turns to ice. This happens so frequently and involves so many body parts that I started laughing every time Minier popped up with a new one. This novel is a terrific example of how not to write.